This week celebrates the 350th anniversary of the first book of poetry written in America. Anne Dudley
Bradstreet's The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America was published in London in 1650, where it
was a great literary success.
The commemorative activities listed here
take place in the towns where she lived, beginning with her arrival in Salem in 1630 and ending in North Andover
where she died in 1672. Governor Paul Cellucci has honored the poet by declaring the anniversary of her death,
September 16, 2000, as Anne Bradstreet Day throughout the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.
Born in England ca. 1612, daughter of
Thomas Dudley, Steward to the Earl of Lincoln, Anne was raised in the Earl's household, where her talent for
reading and writing was encouraged. At 16, she married Simon Bradstreet, and in 1630 the two Puritan families
left England on John Winthrop's flagship Arbella for the Bay Colony, where both her father and husband
would later become governors. After a brief stay in Cambridge, Anne moved to Ipswich, then to North Andover.
Anne lived in America from the age of 18 until her death at 60.
This remarkable gentlewoman of frail health
raised eight children in the wilderness and continued to write at a time when women's intellectual abilities
were scorned. Her poems, of courage, faith and grace, have not only historic value, but also a compelling vision
still relevant today.
